Submissions for Journal ‘Dante e l’arte’

The editors of the journal Dante e l’arte welcome submissions for its fifth issue devoted to Dante and Blake.

William Blake’s illustrations for the Divina Commedia, producedin the last three years of his life between 1824 and 1827, included 102 watercolors and seven engravings. Blake scholarship has largely considered these illustrations as interpretative and symbolic, based on W.B. Yeats’ commentary on them and on Albert S. Roe’s analysis of the whole series in 1953, followed by the contributions of Rodney Baine (1987) and David Fuller (1988) that seek a more literal interpretation of Blake’s Dantean corpus. More recently, Eric Pyle’s study on William Blake’s illustrations on the Commedia (2015) suggests that he undertook an aesthetic exercise to complete Dante’s theology, and in particular, Blake’s notion that God and man are indivisible.

This special issue of Dante e l’Arte seeks to put together authoritative and original contributions that examine any aspect of Blake’s renderings of Dante’s Commedia, from aesthetic considerations to interpretative, literary, theological, linguistic, historical, biographical, and cultural receptions of Blake’s Dantean corpus. To what an extent is Blake challenging the viewer to new readings of Dante? Is he more literal than symbolic? Is Blake rewriting Dante theologically and aesthetically? What is the influence of Blake’s Dantism in contemporary readings of the Commedia?